This Map Shows How Local Rents Are Some of the Worst in America

Los Angeles remains as one of the most expensive cities in the nation for renters, according to a new analysis from rental website Zumper.

The site's National Rent Report analyzed February data and concluded that L.A. has the fourth highest median "price per bedroom" in the nation ($1,450) behind number one San Francisco ($2,850), number two New York ($2,640) and number three Washington, D.C. ($1,800).

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When it comes to one-bedroom units, the site's main metric for this report, L.A. came in seventh place with a median rent of $1,760. A spokesman says Santa Monica was the priciest community in the market last month:

Downtown Santa Monica is most expensive neighborhood with median of $3,000.

Other SoCal cities made the top 20 list of most expensive American cities for renters, too. San Diego had the 11th highest median one-bedroom rent, $1,480. And Long Beach, taken separately from the L.A. market, came in at number 18 with a $1,100 one-bedroom median

The site sent us this map of median rents in L.A. for January, too:

Zumper

The median price of a two-bedroom apartment in L.A., a whopping $2,500, put us in fourth place in that category, behind San Francisco (in first place, at $4,650!), New York (number two, with $3,600), and Oakland and San Jose (tied for third with $2,770), Zumper found.

Los Angeles fares even worse when you weigh our high rents against our relatively low incomes (the local individual median is less than $28,000 annually). In fact a UCLA study last year determined just that: ours is the least affordable rental market in America when you consider the divide between prices and income.

Despite rent control for the city of L.A.'s older buildings, rents in the market were up 4.1 for the latest quarter, the site said.

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Dennis Romero is an L.A. Weekly staff writer. He formerly worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times, where he participated in Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the L.A. riots. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone online, the Guardian and, as a young stringer, the New York Times.